Learn by Experiencing; Learn from the Experienced

George Merlis

George Merlis, a veteran print and broadcast journalist, is the founder and president of Experience Media Consulting. He draws upon his long, award-winning media career to prepare clients for media encounters, legislative testimony and presentations. His crisis communications consulting work is grounded in his journalism career, covering dozens of crises since the 1960s.

He was executive producer of ABC’s Good Morning America for seven of that program’s most successful years and he created the version of the CBS Morning News that launched the anchor career of Diane Sawyer.

His first big story, which he covered as a newspaper reporter fresh out of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, was the building of the Berlin wall during the summer of 1961. Decades later, as a television producer, he covered the destruction of that symbol of oppression, making him one of a handful of newsmen who had covered both beginning and end of that 29-year-long saga.

Early in his career, Merlis was a print reporter and sports editor for the Rome Daily American, a newspaper for the expatriate community in Italy.

He worked at the New York World Telegram and Sun and then served as day city editor of the New York World Journal Tribune — at the time the nation’s largest circulation afternoon newspaper.

Turning to television, Merlis worked at ABC for nearly 20 years, serving as an investigative producer on The Reasoner Report. In addition to Good Morning America and the CBS Morning News, he was executive producer of Entertainment Tonight. He has been nominated for the Emmy award nine times and won once. Merlis has covered hundreds of crises and conducted or overseen well over 10,000 interviews in his media career.

He is the author of three books on media mastery: “How to Make the Most of Every Media Appearance,” “How to Master the Media,” and the current “Merlis on Media Mastery.”